Currently, pharmaceutical companies issue prescription drug coupons, vouchers, or copay cards direct to health care professionals (HCP) or physicians (Point of Care), pharmacies (Point of Sale), or traditional and nontraditional Direct to Consumer (DTC) channel marketing mix (including print, TV, radio, patient starter kits, sample with a copay card or voucher attached, branded websites, unbranded websites, Quick Response codes (QR codes), SMS Text, Mobile Coupons, ePrescribing, Mobile Wallets, Email PDF attachments) with the intent to help reduce the out-of-pocket expense to patients and promote compliance and persistency on the course of therapy using copay cards or vouchers on certain pharmaceutical drugs. It should be noted that copay cards or vouchers can be used one time or can be used multiple times for ongoing out-of-pocket savings to a patient. The physicians or pharmacies distribute the copay cards or vouchers directly to the consumers or patients. When the consumer or patient receives the copay card or voucher from the physician, pharmacy, or DTC marketing campaign, the consumer can redeem the copay card or voucher at a pharmacy with a valid written prescription from the patient's physician to reduce the out-out-of pocket price of the pharmaceutical drug. The copay card or voucher can be a secondary claim at the pharmacy management system and the pharmacy processing fees and payment of the secondary claim can be handled by an established adjudicator partnership that deploys the copay card or voucher marketing programs on behalf of their clients.
Pharmaceutical brand marketing program information have been traditionally delivered to field sales force personnel by way of a spreadsheet, such as Microsoft® Excel, via e-mail or via an online portal. Marketing program information delivered within the spreadsheets can be filtered by members of the field sales force to generate an optimized customer targeting strategy for their territory. With mobility technology advances, members of the field sales force have been outfitted with tablet computers, such as Apple® iPads, to engage with their key stakeholders (e.g., their important physicians or pharmacies).
However, there is a lack of an ability to deliver the information related to such activities to the field sales force to enable real-time updates and analysis to improve sales coverage.